Thread by @patio11

I had the opportunity to speak with a class of fellows at the Impact Africa Network a few months ago, and enjoyed the experience and their questions.

impactafrica.network

Talented geeks exist everywhere; market structures that support them do not.

I was struck by how similar some of their challenges were to the ecosystems I've been directly physically in in Ogaki and Tokyo.

Lack of mentors, social scripts for success which only allowed young people to aspire to BigCo jobs, little opportunity for skill building early.

Mark, the CEO, sent me an interesting email earlier today, about the cost structure for employing geeks in Africa while they skill them up. The subject was 509.

$509 (US) per month per employee in average fully-loaded cost of employment.

That's an interesting advantage!

They run an accelerator, and I'm generally pretty bearish on accelerators. I say that as someone whose first job was at one.

The world has maybe three or four examples of ones which are actually successful, and the denominator is much bigger.

They're very early, but I think the aggregate impact on the world if there were one more would be pretty cool, and in my conversations with them I thought "You know, you folks certainly seem to understand this better than I did back when it was theoretically speaking my job."

They're organized as a 501c3 U.S. charity and are raising to cover operational costs for next year. Details are on the website but, in brief, it pretty much all goes to paying people salaries so that they can work on useful engineering/marketing/etc after university.

So if you were looking for an interesting thing to do for the global tech community late in this year, that's an option.

Their donor logo wall ( impactafrica.network/founderchallen… ) is kind of ridiculous, and if it included far more modest checks, would have at least one from Tokyo.

There is a lot more detail on the site or if you're just wondering "Do they have a donate button?" then the answer is "Yes and it's here"

donorbox.org/bridge-to-the-…

"Is all of this an endorsement?"

*shrug* Ask somebody more professionally involved in capital allocation what a rigorous derisking process would look like. I'm just a geek who got his start selling randomly generated bingo cards from next to a rice paddy.